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Egypt’s archaeology chief Zahi Hawass said that discovery and the latest finds show that the workers were paid laborers, rather than the slaves of popular imagination.

Hawass told reporters at the site that the find, first announced Jan. 10, sheds more light on the lifestyle and origins of the pyramid builders. Most importantly, he said the workers were not recruited from slaves commonly found across Egypt during pharaonic times.

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once described the pyramid builders as slaves, creating what Egyptologists say is a myth later propagated by Hollywood films.

One popular myth holds that ancient Israelite slaves — ancestors of the Jewish people — built the pyramids.

Amihai Mazar, professor at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that assertion stemmed from an erroneous claim by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, on a visit to Egypt in 1977, that Jews built the pyramids.

“No Jews built the pyramids because Jews didn’t exist at the period when the pyramids were built,” Mazar said.

Dorothy Resig, an editor of Biblical Archaeology Review in Washington, D.C., said the idea probably arose from the Old Testament Book of Exodus, which says that “the Egyptians enslaved the children of Israel with backbreaking labor” and that Pharaoh put them to work constructing buildings.

“If the Hebrews built anything, then it was the city of Ramses as mentioned in Exodus,” said Mazar.

Dieter Wildung, a former director of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum, said it is “common knowledge in serious Egyptology” that the pyramid builders were not slaves and that the construction of the pyramids and the story of the Israelites in Egypt were separated by hundreds of years.

“The myth of the slaves building pyramids is only the stuff of tabloids and Hollywood,” Wildung said by telephone. “The world simply could not believe the pyramids were build without oppression and forced labor, but out of loyalty to the pharaohs.”

Hawass said the builders came from poor Egyptian families and were respected for their work — so much so that those who died during construction were given the honor of being buried in the tombs near the sacred pyramids of their pharaohs.

“No way would they have been buried so honorably if they were slaves,” he said.